


On a Whim

by UmbreonGurl



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Dark themes considering who this is about, Gen, Introspection, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24338494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UmbreonGurl/pseuds/UmbreonGurl
Summary: Futaba Sakura often makes many of her important decisions on a whim.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	On a Whim

Futaba starts learning to code on a whim. 

She’d always been good at puzzles, and when she first picks up a book on C++ and starts to read, she becomes addicted almost immediately. Coding helps to drown out the voices temporarily— cries of “ _murderer!”_ replaced by ones and zeroes, ifs and elses and thens.

She grasps it quickly, all things considered. She’s always been a quick study, and with things she’s interested in, she’s even more so. It’s something that never did make her a lot of friends, but she doesn’t need them. She’s fine in her room. Nobody would want to be friends with a _murderer_ after all, and if they didn’t like her before, they surely wouldn’t like her now.

She progresses over long nights with more instant yakisoba than any one person should eat, a few too many energy drinks than is probably healthy, and a room that grows messier by the day. She starts to pick up more languages as she goes along—Python, Java, C#, pretty much as she can get her hands on. If it will run on a computer, she wants—no, _needs_ — to learn it. 

After the first language, every one that follows comes to her as easily as breathing. (Some days, she’d argue that the coding is far easier, when her chest is so tight she can hardly breathe and screams ring in her ears.)

Between gaming, coding, and binge-watching television, her mind is always busy. She cannot stop— if she leaves her mind empty for even a second, it will wander to places she’d rather it not.

_It’s all my fault. I’m the reason she died._

Coding is only a temporary safe haven. Like everything else, the voices eventually infect it too. It’s a virus. The screams change with her mind, loud yells into lines of code.

Computers are far simpler than people. You put in an input, you get an output, and the code always does exactly what you tell it to. (It may not always do what it is _supposed_ to do, but that is the fault of the coder, not the computer. No— the computer does as it's told, unlike her.)

_“You’re such a disobedient child,” says the man in the black suit. “Maybe if you were a good girl and did what you were told your mother wouldn’t have died.”_

Futaba is a good girl at heart. She knows this, but that is still not good enough. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and while Futaba doesn’t even know how to drive, she somehow ended up speeding down it anyways.

_“It’s your fault she’s dead.”_

The more times she hears it, the more she believes it.

She is terrified. She is terrified of the outside world, terrified of herself, terrified of what she has become.

Safety is temporary. Futaba’s room is her both her safe haven and her prison, and in time, it will become her tomb as well. And perhaps… Perhaps it’s what she deserves.

* * *

Like with coding, Futaba starts hacking on a whim.

Every hacker has a name, has their own quirks, their own style, and Futaba is no different.

Futaba takes the name Medjed.

She supposes it’s symbolic, in a way. She’d always been a fan of stories of ancient Egypt, and from behind a screen, she is no longer the scared little girl with bags under her eyes, no longer the scared little girl who screams through the night, no longer the scared little girl who never leaves her room. As Medjed, the world is at her fingertips from behind a screen, and nothing is out of her reach. At the same time, everything is still so far away.

Medjed the smiter: a god who hides their true form underneath a sheet like she hides behind her screen. It’s ironically fitting. Medjed the smiter: he who shoots flames of punishment with his eye, yet remains unseen.

Nobody bats an eye when a salesman’s shady recordkeeping is mysteriously leaked, and they don’t look twice when video footage leaks of a low level government official bragging about spending people’s tax money on his vacation.

“Just a hacktivist” Medjed is small news—it’s not as important as the upcoming elections nor the record-breaking storm the day prior. Medjed is small news, but for a while, being Medjed helps.

Futaba knows that—like all good things—Medjed won’t last forever. The voices and screams still worm their way in, and just as she can look out onto the world through her screen, so too, can the world look back in.

When it stops helping, she stops being Medjed. It’s not long after she does so that others take up the name instead, and Futaba leaves them to it.

Medjed was always Futaba, but Futaba was never Medjed. Medjed was a mask, a farce, a figurative sheet for her to hide under like the god whose name she stole. 

The name had lost its usefulness long before others had started using it. Perhaps the imposters will do a better job than she did. After all, what right does _she_ have to smite down others?

Maybe this time the voices were on to something.

She is no smiter, she is no god, no—Futaba Sakura is a murderer, and some part of her waits for the day Medjed the smiter will come for her too. 

* * *

Reaching out to the Phantom Thieves is another decision Futaba makes on a whim. 

It’s dumb luck, really, that her bad habit of nosing into Sojiro’s life brings the opportunity to even do so right to her doorstep. (Or at least very close to it, considering the leader of the Phantom Thieves lives in Leblanc’s attic.)

Futaba sends the first text on impulse more than anything. Logically, she has no way of even knowing if this will work, if they can help at all—changing people’s hearts isn’t something she’s all that familiar with.

Worst comes to worst, she does it under a spoofed number, and if anyone comes looking for Alibaba— well, good luck with that. Many have tried, and she doubts someone without any idea what they’re doing would be able to sniff her out if experienced hackers never could. 

It’s low risk, as far as impulsive decisions go. Worst comes to worst, the Phantom Thieves can’t help, or the incredibly damning conversations she’d heard weren’t true and the boy who lives in Sojiro’s attic _isn’t_ the leader of the Phantom Thieves. (Who knows, maybe he’s a roleplayer or something.) That’s fine. If she is wrong in her assumptions, she’ll simply never contact them again, and she’ll go back to trying to figure things out herself. 

And if she isn’t wrong, with the added incentive of her offer to take out the Medjed wannabes currently on their asses, the Phantom Thieves would be fools not to take her deal. She even made it easy for them and prepared the calling card. They’ll change her heart, she’ll clown on those idiots, and that will be that. 

It’s simple. 

At least— it was supposed to be. 

The Phantom Thieves need a name to change someone’s heart. As much as she wants to protest it, they have no reason to lie about it. They likely _do_ need a name.

As much as she wants to be Alibaba and as much as she had wanted to be Medjed, Futaba knows that they are not her. Medjed is not Alibaba and Alibaba is not Futaba. If they need her name, so be it. It’s not like she’ll ever have to see them in person. 

A name. _That_ she can do. 

_“Futaba Sakura,”_ she types. Her finger hovers over the letter M for a few seconds before she moves it and hits send. 

They’ll know of her crimes soon enough anyways.

* * *

This time, the whim that brings the Phantom Thieves her way is not her own.

Futaba panics when she hears footsteps downstairs, and voices that _definitely_ aren’t Sojiro’s. They weren’t supposed to come to her house. That wasn’t how it worked, was it? Heart stealing wasn’t supposed to involve them actually coming here. No, that _definitely_ wasn’t in Futaba’s plans.

The power going out is both a blessing and curse. For a brief moment, Futaba is blind to the world, without her cameras and screens— and she screams.

She can make out someone muttering from downstairs about leaving, so she takes the opportunity to run downstairs to quickly reset the circuit breaker. 

They’re still there. 

Futaba makes a run for it and shuts herself back in her room long before the time she hears Sojiro yell up to her. It only takes a few minutes for the power to come back on, but it feels like hours. By that point, the intruders have long left, gone with Sojiro to the shop.

“Let’s talk at my shop,” he had said. “She’ll hear us if we stay here.” 

Futaba almost wants to snort at that. Poor, innocent old man. She’ll hear them there too. She listens closely, but the words that come out of her headphones blur as time goes on.

Mother watches from over her shoulder, smiling. 

“Listen up dear,” she says. “He’s going to tell them _all_ about your crimes, about how you _killed_ me.”

“Shut up,” hisses Futaba. 

“Such a selfish, disobedient child,” Mother coos. “You should learn to listen to your mother. It’s the least you could do. I raised you better than this.”

Ftuaba’s fingers clench around her mouse, and she quickly opens her settings and turns the volume up to maximum. 

“So someone can have a palace even if they’re not evil?” says one of the girls, the blonde.

“If only they knew,” Mother whispers into her ear, drowning out the voices in her headphones. “You’re not evil. You’re worse than that. I wish you were never born.”

Mother seems like she wants to say more, but is cut off when something knocks one of the many empty energy drink cans off of her desk. 

_Since when did the cat get here?_

* * *

Futaba enters her own palace on a whim.

She knows it’s a stupid choice, but some part of her can’t help but wonder how the app that appeared on her phone works. And not only that— who made it? And how did it get on her phone? Nothing should be able to worm its way into her hardware without Futaba knowing. Then again, nothing about this situation is normal, is it?

She’s more testing the waters than anything— in theory, the Phantom Thieves should be busy stealing her heart by now. She really shouldn’t mess with things, but she’s curious.

A name, a place, and a distortion. That’s all it takes.

She already knew the first two… and she can recall the Phantom Thieves bugging her outside her door for what she thought her room was. They’d stopped after she said she’d die here, right? 

“The distortion…” she says, thinking out loud, “is it maybe… tomb?”

As soon as she utters the word tomb, she’s dragged into the desert. The stone stairs of the temple are cool under her feet, like the fridge next to her desk is when she lets her foot drift a little too close to it.

She half expects to hear mother hissing in her ear, to hear the men in suits jeering, but the voices remain silent. For the first time in a long time, the only voice Futaba hears is her own. She looks into her own eyes, watches as the pharaoh of a broken kingdom takes her hand and leads her to a mural with a sad smile.

“Do you remember?” she asks. “What really happened?”

Futaba hesitates, briefly.

“I do,” she says. She looks at the figures in the suits. “It’s when they read Mom’s note. After I killed her.”

Her mirror simply stares at her. 

“Is that really what happened?” she asks. “Because I remember it very differently. You did not kill her, Futaba.”

“And who are you to decide that?” says Futaba. The voices may be silent, but echoes remain. She can still hear them clear as day if she thinks hard enough. “How do you know?”

Her head hurts, and all the voices aside from Mom’s come back at maximum volume.

_“It’s your fault.”_

_“You should have never been born.”_

_“Murderer!”_

Her mirror puts her hands on her shoulders and stares into her eyes, and the voices become static in the background.

“I know because I am you and you are me. It is time for us to remember, Futaba, and it is far past time for us to stop living on the whims of liars.” She smiles. “Take what is yours. Take what is _ours._ Alibaba has the world at her fingertips, why can’t you?”

A roar from outside makes the ground underneath her feet shake, and Futaba loses her footing briefly.

Her mirror takes her hand and helps her up.

“Go,” she says, shoving Futaba forward. “They are waiting.”

Like with most of her decisions recently, Futaba goes on a whim. She doesn’t look back.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I really was supposed to be writing more for my current longfic projects but I love Futaba sm and the brainworms wouldn't leave me alone. Ngl I'm pretty happy with this piece, and I really hope I did Futaba justice.


End file.
